Too long have I been away from my pen, or rather, my keyboard. I’ve been meaning to write, but have instead allowed myself to be courted by the ephemera on the ink blank screen that I cradle in my hand, more often than the hand of another living being.
But after a particularly involved week, last week specifically, I decided I needed to extricate myself from a cell of my own making. I decided to swap the algorithm for nature’s rhythm, and from it this short essay emerged.
Walking for me has been a permanent companion, especially living in an incredibly walkable city as London - it’s often the more expedient and nearly always the more picturesque means of traversing a city with more layers of history than a mille crepe cake. I can start to feel a little flimsy, physically and psychologically, if I do not habitually engage in a long meandering walk. So, come Friday, I ventured north. I had thought some of the quieter nooks of Hampstead Heath would serve as sanctum, but somehow the tube gods had other plans. As I hurtled along the northern line, and exited the barriers, I realised my feet had brought me to Highgate instead. I wondered momentarily if I should course correct, but quickly understood that my desire to be in kinship with Big Nature was being undermined by my desire to control the experience - continuously tinkering on the thermostat of my own life, always aiming for a curated peak moment. Enough - I exited the station and that was that.
Queen’s Wood holds a special charm. It’s a seven minute walk, if one is dragging one’s urban feet, sitting opposite the equally resplendent, but often too waylaid by human forms, Highgate Wood. A few years back I had been seeking an ancient encounter, particularly of an arboreal kind. I had googled about and came across some sites that still had roots - quite literally - in a London that dated back centuries. Call it my melancholic, seeker of the sublime, or romantic disposition, but I crave continuous touch points with the ancient, the mythic, and poetic. Queen’s Wood came up as such a one, and I recall my first visit.
It would have been mid-week - I find Wednesdays especially ideal for losing oneself in other-worlds. It was pouring with rain, and I spent most of my time huddled under a wooden rafter of a closed cafe-cum-fairy-drinking hole, just inside the wood’s entrance. I was completely entranced. Listening to the rain pour, a complex soundscape interlaced with some very palpable mercurial, mischievous energy, emerged as I attuned to the atmosphere. I would have been unsurprised if a wood being had passed in front of me, pottering between one oak and another. The air was thick with life, and the rain seemed to have awakened a general chatter amongst the trees. Since this encounter, Queen’s Wood lodges rent free in my internal landscape, as a small pocket of the delightfully weird and immensely restorative.
So last Friday, this is where I once again found myself. Quite a different day: no rain, plenty of sun, an open cafe, first time mums exchanging stories over oat lattes, dogs wandering and a particularly loud disembodied voice of some teacher some place, trying to corral a group of invisible students. I had brought a tea cake with me in the spirit of a most discreet picnic, got a coffee from the wooden fairy cafe, and headed in straight amongst the hornbeams. This particular tree has over time worked its magic upon me. The name itself I find for some reason, utterly delightful - a portmanteau of two words that have very little to do with the appearance of the tree itself. What’s more I love their posture, a combination of the languid and the dignified. They are also spaced in Queen’s Wood in such a way that feels expansive, even though it’s only 21 hectares.
I spotted a trunk lying on its side with a pool of light coalescing down through the canopy, and decided this was the spot to become still. I confess as I had walked that short distance into the Wood, I had felt lethargic and quite sapped of energy. The strings of life that one has to constantly tend to - across the domestic, the vocational and relational - often create the conditions for becoming entangled in a near permanent state of doing over being. As I sat with my humble picnic, my body started to attune: deeper breath, a relaxation of posture and an inclination towards smiling erupted upon my face. In the glow of the uninterrupted sunbeams, with light dappling on the edges, my face and hands felt caressed, nurtured, kissed. To be held in the presence of something that does not locally, specifically orient towards you, but envelopes you as part of a larger ecosystem, is the kind of existential humility I was seeking in my pursuit of the ancient.
As I sat on the tree trunk, I was relieved to know that my human presence could not interfere with the larger dynamics at play. The relationship between the oaks, beeches, hornbeams, robins, caterpillars, coppiced trees and undergrowth of fungi and ants and spiders and lichen, all of it, continued on without my presence imposing anything superfluous. At that moment, all that was asked of me was to be a good guest - present, gracious, and respectful. I watched many fellow wood-goers walk past me: a pair of friends, a mother with her child, a elderly man with his dog. Each no doubt with rich interior lives, and external lives of complexity, moment to moment walking the path that hovers between the meaningful and the mundane. In them I saw myself, and how we each were lucky to be in the presence of these ancient relationships that epitomise how diversity of life is the way - with the good is the ‘bad’, with the comfortable is that which is uncomfortable. Wood is home to hundreds of species that have found a rhythm of co-existence.
As I sat for longer, my energy restored itself. Or rather, it returned from parts that I had scattered all around the world, through my attention given so loosely, so unthinkingly, to people, stories and intentions, that were only sometimes life-ennobling. So often we extend ourselves into spaces, conversations, ecosystems and structures, that are not of our concern, whilst ignoring that which is much nearer, keener, and asking for us to attend to much more locally. I had to literally ambush myself with bushes and flora to get myself back in my body and my senses, and to attend to only that which I could perceive in 3D space.
Sitting in a wood dating back at least to the 1600s, and likely much earlier than that, was to feel a part of a long chain of custody, too. I would never meet the people who had cultivated these woods, who had done so very deliberately, in response to over-exploitation of the trees. It was felt that the common land shared by many, was victim to extraction without regeneration, and the wood was designed in a way to return long-term growth back to the trees, protected from wandering deers as much as wandering human greed.
I felt the continued presence of stewardship from the 1600s to that morning in the year 2026, as I wandered without aim but an intention to be wholly, solely, present. There were marks of continued human care and attention - areas cordoned off to allow for soil to regenerate; coppiced areas to allows for the littler ones in the ecosystem to have a place of safety to romp about it; hand-woven thicket structures to protect small pocketed ponds and the species that call that particular zone of North London, home.
In time I felt my time had come to a natural completion; a good guest always knows the best time to leave.
I gave thanks to the Wood as I passed through it. At the threshold back on to the road, I paused to express my gratitude for being made so welcome. I did not create anything that I beheld, my attention and intention were my only points of contribution to this experience. I aimed to be a good a guest, and hope my host will have me back soon.
Always,
H
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